An internal investigation ordered by the Somerset School Committee failed to reveal who altered MCAS tests in 2010 at the Wilbur Elementary School.

So far, the investigation has cost the school department more than $32,000, with more bills to come, according to Business Manager Marc Furtado.

Rather than releasing the report of the investigation conducted by attorney Kathryn Murphy, School Committee Chairman Jamison Souza read a prepared statement with little information about the findings to a crowd of about 35 parents and teachers.

“While we would have preferred that the investigation report identify the individual or individuals who were responsible for this conduct, I am convinced that Ms. Murphy’s investigation pursued every possible avenue of this matter. At this point in time, we are treating this investigation as completed,” Souza said.

He called the test-tampering scandal a long and difficult process for the staff, students, parents and the Somerset community as a whole.

“We look forward to returning the Wilbur School Community to its rightful place in student learning,” Souza said.

School board member Robert Camara, who has a child at Wilbur Elementary, acknowledge the difficulty the staff and students have faced during the past few years and asked that the public allow the school to move ahead.

He said he felt the investigation was thorough and “there was no smoking gun.”

While parents had an opportunity to address the board, they were prohibited from exchanging dialogue or have questions answered by the school committee.

The mother of one of the Wilbur students whose test was altered said that, in the hundreds of documents released by DESE, it showed that someone failed to immediately send out the tests and that they were held for 10 days.

“Are there any consequences for someone holding onto those tests for 10 days when they should have been sent out immediately?” asked the mother.

She did not receive an answer from the school committee.

The report will be available to the public, Souza said, if they submit a request for public records to Superintendent Richard Medeiros.

The Somerset school board agreed to its own investigation in July and directed Murphy’s law firm, Murphy, Hesse, Toomey & Lehane, to start the inquiry. The law firm represents the Somerset School Department.

DESE conducted the initial investigation in 2011.

But Murphy didn’t receive a binder full of documents from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education until January, after a public information request from the school board.

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education began an investigation in January 2011 after receiving a complaint from a parent of a Wilbur Elementary School fifth-grader.

After DESE concluded its investigation, it invalidated every MCAS test taken at the Wilbur Elementary School in 2010 after it found enough evidence of test administration and security violations. But DESE never identified a specific staff member who had committed the wrongdoing.

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The investigation found a “decidedly higher number of erasures than the state average” on answer booklets, with a “vast majority” of answers changed from incorrect responses to correct ones, according to a letter from Mitchell Chester, the state commissioner of elementary and secondary education.

The state also found a “disturbing pattern” of answers to open-response questions in which students’ original responses were erased and replaced with correct answers that were not supported by the students’ “original computations and logic,” Chester said.

In another letter to Medeiros in May 2012, Chester claimed adults at the school “betrayed” Wilbur Elementary School, and while the investigation interviewed about 50 students, parents, educators, staff, students, it was also “hindered by difficulty in locating and then securing the cooperation of some witnesses.”

Joan DeAngelis, who was principal at Wilbur Elementary School when the MCAS tests were tampered with, left the Somerset School District in September to take a similar position in West Warwick, R.I.